Parkinson's disease (PD) is a slowly progressive and highly debilitating disease of the central nervous system, affecting 8,000,000 or more people the world over. By the time the disease is diagnosed, 60% of nerve cells in the substantia nigra are degenerated and 80% of dopamine is depleted in the striatum. There is an urgent need for cost-effective methods to detect the disease in its early ph...

The development of our ability to recognize (vocal) emotional expression has been relatively understudied. Even less studied is the effect of linguistic (spoken) context on emotion perception. In this study we investigate the performance of young (1825) and old (60-85) listeners on two tasks: an emotion recognition task where emotions expressed in a sustained vowel (/a/) had to be recognized an...

Loudness growth prediction using normal templates of loudness derived with ABR and DPOAE measures was investigated in 20 children 4 to 12 years and 20 adults with normal hearing. An ABR click latency-intensity function (LIF), ABR 2 kHz tone LIF, and DPOAE 2 kHz amplitude-intensity function (AIF) were recorded from each listener. A loudness-intensity function was also measured for each electroph...

This paper reviews the effects of one sound on the loudness of a following sound. The following sound is usually perceived as softer than when presented in isolation. At least five sequential effects can be identified. (1) Simple loudness adaptation: the earlier part of an ongoing sound results in a decline in the loudness of later parts. (2) Ipsilaterally induced adaptation: increments in the ...

According to experience in voice therapy and singing pedagogy, breathing habits can be used to modify phonation, although this relationship has never been experimentally demonstrated. In the present investigation we examine if lung volume affects phonation. Twenty-four untrained subjects phonated at different pitches and degrees of vocal loudness at different lung volumes. Mean subglottal press...

Speech can be segmented into syllables by identifying the syllable nuclei, which are points of high sonority. The excitation peaks in the linear prediction (LP) residual and the formant peaks can be interpreted as perceptually significant point features which contribute to the loudness of speech. In this paper, the use of these two point features is described for the use of detecting syllable n...

Sudden changes in loudness because of loud commercials and variations in loudness levels between programs have been a major source of nuisance for the consumers. With the transition to Digital TV, loudness related issues have not only continued but are on the rise. Traditional techniques of loudness measurement are ineffective for digital broadcast. Techniques for digital broadcast need to be o...

In a previous study (Stenfelt and Håkansson, 2002) a loudness balance test between bone conducted (BC) sound and air conducted (AC) sound was performed at frequencies between 0.25 and 4 kHz and at levels corresponding to 30-80 dB HL. The main outcome of that study was that for maintaining equal loudness, the level increase of sound with BC stimulation was less than that of AC stimulation with a...

The transmission protocol of voiced speech is hypothesized to be based on a fundamental excitation or drive process, which synchronizes the vocal tract excitation on the transmitter side and evokes the loudness and pitch perception on the receiver side. The fundamental drive can be extracted from the speech signal by using a voice-specific subband decomposition. When used as fundamental drive o...

Bulgarian folk music usually involves women as singers and men as instrumentalists. It is often performed outdoors, where high levels of radiated vocal power are preferred. Two singing productions can be distinguished, which differ by their perceived loudness and timbre. The louder, more projected sound is labelled as /teshka/ (meaning /heavy/), and it tends to be used more in slower, sadder so...